NetApp on Wednesday said it agreed to acquire CacheIQ, a developer of flash storage technology that supports non-disruptive operations in enterprise data centers.

Nick Noviello, CFO and executive vice president of finance at NetApp, told CRN that CacheIQ is a small developer of intellectual property related to data mobility, with just a few employees and a small revenue. He declined to give specifics.

"This is a very small company," Noviello said. "We can keep going with their current path, or add it to our products."

[Related: NetApp Intros Software To Manage Multivendor PCIe Flash-Based Storage]

However, Noviello declined to provide details about the technology CacheIQ brings to NetApp.

Tom Georgens, president and CEO, said at NetApp's second fiscal 2013 financial conference call that CacheIQ should be thought of as more of a technology "tuck-in" than as a provider of stand-alone technology.

The CacheIQ website was already taken down except for a note asking visitors to contact NetApp for more information.

However, cached press releases available online from CacheIQ refer to the Austin, Texas-based company's development of the RapidCache, a NAS acceleration appliance.

In a September 2012 press release, RapidCache was described as an "intelligent NAS acceleration appliance that delivers unmatched performance to I/O-intensive applications."

RapidCache "identifies the most active dataset by analyzing the network flow between clients and file servers and serves it directly from its local DRAM and SSDs, vastly improving the performance of files in greatest demand. RapidCache users can further optimize NAS cache behavior by using CacheIQ's unique policy engine to set caching rules based on business criticality and usage patterns," according to the press release.

RapidCache uses simple policies to determine what data gets cached to its DRAM and SSD tier to improve the performance for important applications, and offers a fully-integrated analytics and visualization software to give storage administrators the ability to access network storage performance and troubleshoot problems quickly and efficiently.

The Austin Business Journal on Wednesday reported that CacheIQ was founded in 2010 and had 14 employees in 2011.

CacheIQ in 2010 purchased the intellectual property of Austin, Texas-based Storspeed. The company in 2011 finished a Series A round of financing from 27 angel investors, and in July it received $3.8 million of a planned $4.3 million financing round, the Austin Business Journal reported.

Terms of NetApp's acquisition of CacheIQ were not released.

PUBLISHED NOV. 14, 2012